Comment by samuelstros

> But then the first thing it talks about is diffing files. Which honestly shouldn’t even be a feature of VCS. That’s just a separate layer.

There is nuance between git line by line diffing and what lix does.

For text diffing it holds true that diffing is a separate layer. Text files are small in size which allows on the fly diffing (that's what git does) by comparing two docs.

On the fly diffing doesn't work for structured file formats like xlsx, fig, dwg etc. It's too expensive. Both in terms of materializing two files at specific commits, and then diffing these two files.

What lix does under the hood is tracking individual changes, _which allows rendering a diff without on the fly diffing_. So lix is kind of responsible for the diffs but only in the sense that it provides a SQL API to query changes between two states. How the diff is rendered is up to the application.